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On Resolving Controversies: Enduring Regulatory Neglect in Southern Tamil Nadu
At India’s southern tip, eight reactor buildings line the shore of the coastal communities of Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu—one of the four districts my family and I call home. These reactor buildings are of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP), envisioned to be India’s largest nuclear park. People living in the nearby Idinthakkarai and Kootapalli villages mock the association of a risky technoscientific complex to anything close to a ‘park,’ or poonga—a forest or garden of flowers, in Tamil. The sea that rolls against the compound of KKNPP is where women protestors claimed that they derived their energy to lead the protest against the plant in March 2011. Following suit, fishermen rowed and drove their boats into the sea to protest the commissioning of the plant. (more…) (read more...)
The Human Cost of Precision
In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage. When in 2017, Nadella delivered a talk about the use of assistive artificial intelligence for people suffering from disabilities like CP, he was contacted by one his colleagues in Spain. Julián Isla, a software engineer at Microsoft, emailed Nadella out of a sense of resonance, because his own son suffered from a rare genetic epilepsy making him a parent of a child living with disability as well. Like Nadella, Isla was also motivated to think of the role of artificial intelligence in the assistance of other parents who, as he described, were on the “odyssey of diagnosis”. (more…) (read more...)
Love at First Sprout: Wild Peanuts and Mars’ Plan for Climate Security
An animated peanut with a bowler hat and a white beard sits on one side of a campfire, opposite three smaller peanuts grinning back at him adoringly. Amid the chirping crickets and the crackling of the fire, the older peanut calls out: “Gather round my little legumes, it’s story time!” A small redheaded pod responds, “Grandpa, tell us the M and M’s story again.” Grandpa responds in a chiding tone: “We’ll get there! But, let’s start at the beginning…” (more…) (read more...)